


Gratitude

by Ember_Keelty



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, No Anders without Justice, Rite of Tranquility, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-11-05 13:14:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11014167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ember_Keelty/pseuds/Ember_Keelty
Summary: During the rebellion, Anders is captured while infiltrating a Circle tower, and Hawke rescues him.





	Gratitude

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Like I Have Found You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10964796) by [pikestaff](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pikestaff/pseuds/pikestaff). 



> Pikestaff and I challenged each other to each write an f!Handers fic based on that one banter in Mark of the Assassin. They finished theirs first, and I read it, so I'm linking our works by marking mine as "inspired by" theirs, though it isn't precisely a remix because we started writing at the same time.

They've caught him again.

It took nine years this time, Anders reminds himself. That simple fact serves as kindling for pride, for hope, for a torch to hold against the dark, cold terror. It took nine years, and this isn't even Kinloch Hold they've locked him in. Kinloch Hold is rubble. They'd have to rebuild it from the ground up if they wanted to stick him back there now.

This Circle looks about the same from the dungeons, though. Stone and darkness and iron bars and chains hanging from the ceiling. Everything between there and here, then and now, could almost have been a dream. There always were moments when he feared he might wake up and it would all be gone.

But that isn't what happened, because he _knows_ what happened. He remembers infiltrating the tower to meet with allies on the inside and finalize the details of the planned uprising. Instead, he was ambushed. He'd felt the burn of the Templars' so-called holy fire before he even realized they were in the room with him — and then he'd felt nothing at all, until he woke to the sting of shackles cutting into the old scars on his wrists and the ache of arms forced for longer than they could bear to hold up the weight of his body.

It's a familiar pain, but somehow _more_ than he remembers. So is the hunger gnawing at his stomach, and the hot, thick haze clouding his head from lack of real sleep, and the scorched, hollow feeling at the core of his being from repeated smites and cleanses and doses of magebane poured down his throat.

Anders knows what his captors intend. He might have guessed just from the fact that they haven't killed him yet, but after two years of traveling Thedas and tearing down Circles, he has more to go on than guesswork. Tranquil mages, it turns out, are often perfectly willing to answer questions once the Templars who ordered them not to are dead. Thanks to them, he's learned that the first part of the ritual is a "purification" to weaken the mage's connection to the Fade before the brand is applied. For those who submit meekly to the Rite, that means fasting and holding vigil. For those who resist, it means torture.

The darkness threatens to overwhelm him, but Anders turns inward and holds fast to the light he carries always inside. They will _not_ have him. Not like that. For all the kinds of pain the Templars inflict when they visit his cell to drain him, there is one kind they can no longer use against him: he is never alone. Justice burns within him, battered and weakened but not extinguished. Without mana flowing in from the Fade, the spirit's strength won't be enough to fight past all the Templars that stand between Anders and freedom. But it should be enough to _make_ them kill him, if things reach the point that death is the better option.

Things haven't reached that point yet, because he doesn't _only_ have Justice. He has Hawke, too. He left her at camp with the handful of rebels from fallen Circles who chose to travel with them and spread the fire, a small force to assault the tower and divide the Templars' attention when the uprising starts. By now, she must have realized that something's wrong. He just has to give her time to react.

 _No martyring yourself while I'm not with you_ , she's told him more than once, usually between breathless kisses before they part ways on a mission. He's promised her he won't, and he will not break that promise lightly. Hawke's made promises of her own to him, and he knows her well enough to know that there are few forces in this world that could prevent her from fulfilling them.

The noise of armored boots clanking on stone and voices raised in argument pulls him roughly back to the present. There are Templars approaching. Several of them, it sounds like — more than have come by at once until now. Anders doubts that means anything good.

"There's no time for this! We should just kill him and get out of here!"

"No. It isn't just about making a statement anymore. If we get this one alive, we can get the other one too."

"Not if her thugs are there to ambush us the moment we go back upstairs because the tower falls while we're doing the bloody ritual!"

"You want to run like a coward? No one's stopping you. I'm not about to waste time chasing down deserters. If we're quick and smart about it, we can end this here — and that's what I'm going to do, whether you're with me or not."

"I'm not a—! Yes, Ser. I'm with you."

They want to hurt Hawke. Anders' mind is leaden from exhaustion and slow to process words, but this fear is familiar enough that he recognizes it instantly. They want to break him so that they can use his hollowed-out shell to hurt Hawke. Their order is the same unfathomable evil everywhere, here and Kirkwall and Calenhad, and even as Anders curls in on himself in horror he can feel Justice stirring and unfurling and aching to claim the price they owe.

The cell door opens. There are five of them, a Knight-Lieutenant and his helmeted subordinates. If he unleashes Justice now, Anders thinks, he could probably kill at least one of them before he goes down fighting.

 _Or_ he could kill one of them, take the lyrium-laced blood, and—

And lose control, like he did that first time. No. Never again. Not even in the face of Tranquility, not even to soothe the pain of this horrible emptiness. He is at the base of a tower filled with his own people, and from the way the Templars are talking, it sounds as though his allies are nearby.

It sounds as though _Hawke_ is nearby. The hope of that finally hits him, cutting through the fog of fear and anger. Hawke is coming to save him.

The Templars take Anders down from the chains only to force his hands behind his back and shackle them again, though not without a struggle. He wriggles out of their grasp repeatedly, and they beat him down for it, but he doesn't hold still for them even when their blows drop him to the floor. He is deadweight in their arms when they drag him out of his cell and deeper into the dungeon, except for when he kicks out to catch his feet in the bars of the cages they pass, not caring that the Templars nearly break his legs yanking them free. It's been so many years, but Anders still remembers how to make himself into a nuisance. _Stubborn little shit. Skinny, blond headache._ Back then, he did it for nothing but to preserve his own pride and sense of self. Now, it serves a more practical purpose. Though he succeeds in wasting only seconds of the Templars' time, those are precious seconds that Hawke can use.

He will not let her be too late. He refuses to do that to her. Anders knows too well how it would hurt. But he _cannot_ think of that, cannot let himself think of Karl being dragged through a dark hallway like this one, in pain and in terror but without any hope of rescue.

And not just him. Maker, they've done this so many times, to so many people. They've done this to apprentices — no, damn their carefully tepid words, they have done this to _children_.

They will pay for it. Even if they break him, Hawke will find them and kill them and set him free from that torture. She promised.

The room they take him to is larger than the cell they had him locked in, but it still feels crushingly small, and much of the space within it is taken up by a brazier at the center. The Templars force him to his knees, the faceless peons crowding around to hold him down while the Knight-Lieutenant lights the brazier and sets a branding iron to the fire. The heat is instantly overwhelming. The walls are too tight, trapping it, and Anders feels himself burning even at an arms-length away from the flame itself.

Maybe this really is how everything comes to a close. His magic and his life as _Anders_ began with fire, and now fire will end him.

The Knight-Lieutenant recites a chant. Anders tries to follow it, to understand as much as he can about what the Templars are doing to him in case that understanding can someday be used against them, but the words are drowned out by the song of the lyrium brand itself as it comes alive with heat. The sound rises in pitch and volume as the metal glows brighter and brighter, until it's so loud and shrill that it nearly splits his head open.

 _That_ is what they are going to burn away his mind with, Anders realizes. They are going to press it into his flesh, his skull, almost into his brain, and he will be deafened. He'll never hear the Fade again.

He'll never hear the sound of Hawke's magic again.

Just as he thinks that, though, he _does_ hear it. There: echoing down the stone hallways of the dungeon, faint beneath the screeching of the lyrium, but louder and closer with every second. The timing is almost too perfect — and that scares him, because he knows he is in exactly the right condition to be hearing things that aren't real.

The Knight-Lieutenant stops chanting and lifts the brand from the fire. A gauntleted hand tangles in Anders' hair to hold his head steady.

Right. Now or never. Anders lets go, and blue light washes over his vision.

He rises from his knees. As he stands, there is a moment of resistance, of pressure applied by the grip of enemies that have no right to touch him, but he throws them off and draws himself up to his full height.

The Templars unsheathe their swords but hesitate to advance. Good. He needs their hesitation. He is weaker than he appears to them now, though not so weak as they assumed just moments before, and since they do not understand, they fear. It is a deception of sorts, but one that poses no difficulty to him, for it is a deception that their own ignorance is working upon them.

With their attention fixed on him, they do not see Hawke arrive in the doorway. They do not see the righteous fury in her eyes, in the set of her jaw, in the movement of muscles and mana as she wields her staff. They remain unaware of her presence until a column of force magic slams them to the ground.

Justice's aura swirls and recedes. Anders staggers backward and slumps down against the wall. Hawke is here. She has this. One mage against five Templars in close quarters, and all she needed to get the upper hand was a few seconds worth of a head start. Hawke is strong and skilled and well-practiced at killing their kind, but they might have at least stood a chance if they weren't too bloody stupid to tell a real threat from a mage putting on a lightshow.

A wave of ice sweeps across the floor of the room. It quenches the fire, freezes the Templars where they fell, and silences the shrieking of the brand. Hawke steps forward, lifts her staff high, and slams the blade down through the Knight-Lieutenant's skull. Blood spatters the others where they lie trapped beneath the ice. One of them starts to scream, to beg, and Anders realizes with a sudden swell of pride that _he_ did not beg. Then the blade of Hawke's staff finds a gap in the Templar's armor, and the pleading turns to gurgling turns to silence.

Two others die the same way. When she gets to the last one, Hawke flips her staff around, presses the focus against his helmet, and unleashes a stream of fire. Silverite is strong, and Templar armor is enchanted to resist magic, but all that means now is that the metal heats slowly.

Hot metal against skin. It's poetry. It's vengeance, bright and cruel and not precisely _good_ , but if it is a sin, then it is the least of all sins that have been carried out in this accursed room. The bastard screams his life away as Hawke watches him with pitiless eyes, and Anders watches _her_ with pure adoration.

When it's over, Hawke holsters her staff and crosses the room to his side. Anders reaches out to her without thinking, and only realizes once his hands are where he can see them that Justice's strength must have broken the restraints binding them behind his back. The shackles still circle his wrists, trailing fragments of chain that Hawke takes into her hands. She kneels down beside him and pulls him in close, and cold magic seeps through the metal as she kisses him. Anders hears it first, then feels its touch numbing the sting of the sores on his wrists, and soon the cuffs are so brittle that they snap right open when Hawke gives one sharp tug on the chains.

"I love you," Anders tells her breathlessly when her mouth uncovers his own long enough for him to speak.

"I love you too," Hawke says, voice matter-of-fact. Then, in the same tone: "They're all dead. Every last Templar in the tower _and_ the Loyalist scumbag who ratted you out. We had to rush the final preparations and improvise a little, but we did it."

It helps. Hawke is here, justice has been done, and mages have been freed. Those are all good things. He can focus on them. "And on our side?"

"I couldn't waste time counting casualties, but it didn't look bad. At least the Templars didn't get anywhere near the apprentices. I made sure of that much."

"So you brought me a rescue party _and_ good news." Anders still doesn't have much experience being on the receiving end of either. "You're a wonder, love."

"Not enough money for flowers and chocolates, I'm afraid," she jokes. He hopes she doesn't think that _he_ was joking, because he wasn't. He meant it. "Do you think you can make it up the stairs, or do you need me to get a healer down here?"

"I _am_ a healer," he answers, affronted. "I don't need to bother anyone else. I'm sure the enchanters have enough on their hands right now." Besides, he knows perfectly well that not all of them will be entirely happy to see him.

"If anyone tries to start some stupid argument, now of all times, I _will_ hurt them," Hawke says, because of course she's seen through him.

"All the more reason to avoid that possibility, don't you think?" he points out gently.

"Have it your way, then," says Hawke, and begins casting a rejuvenation spell. In the moment before it takes effect, Anders has just enough time to _almost_ regret that he won't get to watch her punch Loyalists to defend his honor.

Mana comes flowing back into him: a trickle at first, then a steady stream, the gift of the Fade filling him up and making him whole again, making him _right_. Justice takes the power and uses it with all the effortless skill of a spirit healer's long-time partner restoring a body that he knows intimately. The scrapes, the bruises, the soreness in his arms and the throbbing in his head — all of it is wrong and must be rectified. It is unjust that he should suffer for acting with courage and righteousness.

The pain ebbs away until all that remains is a gentle fatigue. Anders is left marveling at its absence. Did it always feel this good simply not to hurt?

The air in the room vibrates with the smell of blood and the melodic whisper of lyrium, a welcome reminder that the sound can be beautiful as well as horrible. There was a time he believed that the singing blue stone must be the most wonderful thing in all the mortal realm. Now he knows better. Now he knows _Hawke_.

Anders pushes forward from the wall to kiss her again. Hawke takes him into her arms and lets his passion wash over her, a pillar in the storm. Patches of drying blood mark her face and neck, and when Anders presses his lips and tongue against them, he can feel them thrumming with more than the usual power of blood. _Templars_. They hurt him and now they are dead, and Hawke is alive and near, and her touch makes Anders believe that he is still alive as well. "I need you," he moans into the hollow of her throat.

"You have me," Hawke assures him. "And I have you." Her hands slide slowly across his waist, teasing the skin beneath his shift with small, soft shocks of electricity, then pull down his trousers and wrap around him. Hawke's palms are hot and slick with the sweat of battle, and Warden stamina be damned, within minutes she has him utterly undone.

He's basking in the rush and in the warmth of Hawke's embrace when a thought occurs that makes him laugh guiltily. "Wait a moment. This isn't how it was supposed to go. I'm the one who should be lavishing attention on _you_."

"You can always start now," Hawke says, voice husky and adoring. She pulls away from him a little, enough to meet his eyes and show him the curve of her smile, then shifts onto her back and guides him down on top of her. His hands aren't quite steady enough to manage the clasps on her trousers, but hers are, and they work together to lay her bare.

Anders buries his head between Hawke's thighs and breathes in her scent. Her legs wrap around him, and her hands stroke his hair. She surrounds him completely. He can feel every shudder and gasp he wins from her, and that drives him on well past the point that his tongue begins to ache. Eventually, Hawke has to be the one to tell him when enough is enough.

It feels strange to disentangle from her and find himself back in the dungeon.

As he and Hawke straighten out their clothes and help each other to stand, his mind drifts to the walls closing them in and the brazier crowding their space. The Templars piled at their feet are not the first people whose lives were taken from them here — though, Maker willing, they will be the last. Anders knows just how deeply fortunate he's been, and for that, he is more grateful than he can ever truly express. But he shouldn't be reveling in that fortune, should he? It's callous, selfish.

No. He has done nothing wrong. No mage should ever have had to feel the burn of the Tranquil brand, but Anders is a mage himself. That the Templars failed at what they had no right to do to him is not somehow _more_ than he deserves. And Hawke is a mage as well. She has suffered unjustly, as all their people have, and still she is brave and good. If the two of them can find comfort in each other, that is a triumph.

"I love you," Anders tells Hawke again. Then: "Justice says he loves you too." Which is a ridiculous way of putting it, but Hawke knows him well enough by now that he trusts her not to take it too literally.

"And I love everything that you are," Hawke answers readily.

She leads the way out of the dungeon. Anders follows, basking in the rightness of rewarded trust.


End file.
